Alan Alda says his face blindness made him not recognize his daughter: ‘I don’t think she was too happy’

Good one, dad.

Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor Alan Alda is opening up about the time he didn’t recognize his own daughter due to a condition he’d later come to find out was prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

In all fairness, the incident occurred on the set of Alda’s film The Four Seasons, after he had had his daughter, Beatrice, dye her hair a completely different color for her role in the comedy. “I saw this person with horn-rimmed glasses and blonde hair staring at me, and it was starting to get distracting,” Alda recalled to PEOPLE. “I said to the assistant director, ‘Don’t let these strangers come on the set.’ He said, ‘That’s your daughter!’ I don’t think she was too happy about that, because neither of us knew that there was such a thing as face blindness [at the time].”

Alda said to this day it’s “very hard” for him to recognize people due to the condition. “When somebody comes up to me, as if they know me, I often don’t know if they know me from seeing me on the screen or if I actually know them,” he told the outlet. “I could have dinner with somebody, spend two hours with somebody next to me, and the next day not know who they are.”

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Alda, 89, has been open about his health struggles in recent years. In 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015.

At the time, he told CBS This Morning he decided to reveal his diagnosis after noticing his “thumb twitch” during some recent TV appearances to promote his podcast, Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda. “I thought, it’s probably only a matter of time before somebody does a story about this from a sad point of view, but that’s not where I am,” he said.

Speaking with PEOPLE more recently, Alda gave an update on his condition, telling the outlet, “I don’t have dexterity with my fingers the way I used to, so sometimes [my wife, Arlene] has to tear a package open for me,” he said. “She’s so good-natured about it. I’m always saying, ‘Thank you.’”

He also admitted that while managing his Parkinson’s has gone from “a part-time job to almost a full-time job” over the past 10 years, he’s still able to keep a positive outlook. “It keeps me always looking for the funny side,” he said.